#multiliteracy

I don’t read books as often anymore—sometimes none at all for a long period of time—but my reading and writing skills still improve everyday, and I continue to learn using different sources of media. Even things that may seem too ridiculous or unrealistic to expand my knowledge still contribute to me learning constantly.

Models of hierarchical complexity and cognitive development:  Assessing the multiliteracy pedagogy.  The International Journal of Learning, 14(1), 135-143.

Part 1

“The act of designing leaves the designer Redesigned (Cope and Kalantzis 2010, 177).”

This quote summarizes the multiliteracies of design quite sufficiently. As the text explains, a designer can take something (available design), edit and transforming that thing how you see fit, or what it represents (designing), finally transforming into a final product (redesigned). The designer creates new meanings through transforming an available design. For example, a designer can take an image of a bird and transform it into a solid blue bird-shaped image. The result is now an image, a brand that represents Twitter. However, available designs are not limited to images; they could also be forms of communication.

Part 2: Critical Reflection

With the advancement of technology and society, new literacies and modalities begin to emerge. From prehistory with oral culture to writing to the invention of the typewriter and the computer, technology has come a long way to create new ways to communicate. Something that Cope and Kalantzis, and Rowsell and Walsh have discussed in their articles is new ways to learn and communicate, and to transform an idea/concept and creating its own entity, even going so far as to rethinking literacy in a constantly changing society. Literacy has changed and, as future educators, we must adapt to this change.

An important concept is the multimodality of meanings. Traditionally, literacy teaching was mainly in written form. However, alongside the written language, new modes have emerged: oral language, visual representation, audio representation, tactile representation, and gestural representation, representation to oneself, and spatial representation (Cope and Kalantzis 2010, p. 178-179). In these various ways we learn to communicate, even using newer technology to represent these new modes. For example, we can write down the word “hello,” wave, say “hello,” or listen to someone say “hello” and the meaning would remain the same, but the modes are different.

Digital literacies allow people to communicate in various ways. Learning how to use Microsoft Excel or Facebook or Twitter would allow us to convey information in a different manner. The internet only complicates this further by attributing various ways that one can communicate with others. For example, Rowsell and Walsh looked at a study examining teenagers’ texting habits. The researchers observed that teenagers were conscious of “choosing different tones and language styles depending on who they were IMing (Rowsell and Walsh 2011, p. 57).” The youth took something simple and made something unique that created a new identity. The advent of instant messaging offered a new way to learn and be creative, especially among the youth.

Bibliography

Cope, Bill and Kalantzis, Mary. “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning”, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4 (3), 2009. 164-195.

What literacy practices do you engage with regularly?

Multiliteracy takes the traditional approach to reading and writing, but importantly extends to consider how people make meanings in a complex world of multiple sources of technology to communicate. Meaning making is influenced by both social diversity and multimodality (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) 

There are many different sorts of people in my life that I mix with on a daily basis: parents, friends, employers, students and lecturers. This social diversity means that there needs to be an adaption to the style of literacy practise and links to the notion of meaning making - the way in which we communicate differently with different people. 

I found myself thinking about the many different ways I communicate ideas within different social contexts. There is not one single way of being in my world. There are times where it is entirely appropriate to be informal and I use a language and a style of communicating that is appropriate for my own peer group – but it is a style of literacy practice that would be quite inappropriate for many other more formal situations.

I created a video to show how my own representation of my internal narrative of procrastination plays out. I communicate this by an external narrative and am expressing a set of ideas that shows how using my computer incorporates ideas around multiliteracy. This is in part an exploration of my “online” identity (Alvermann et al., 2012). 

One literacy practice links to the concept of multimodality in which modes of meaning such as written, audio, visual and oral meanings are all interconnected. I use language every day – not just the language that I was raised in but French, a language that I have acquired during childhood. But I use multiple modes of meaning in taking meaning from languages that I am not familiar with. I watch a Portuguese video on make up relying on her ability to use gesture to communicate her ideas. I play a game from a Japanese site and rely on visual mode of meaning to play the game.  I need to understand the context behind a certain subject in order to work out the meaning that is being conveyed. Being able to understand the context behind a certain subject in order to work out the language is a skill in itself. As a teacher I hope I will be able to apply this literacy to my classroom, and be able to help student who come from a non-English speaking background.

"Two key concepts help us describe multimodal meanings and the relationships of different Designs of Meaning: hybridity and intertextuality (Fairclough 1992a; Faairclough 1992b). The term hybridity highlights the mechanism of creativity and of culture-as-process as particularly salient in contemporary society. People create and innovate by hybridising, that is by articulating in new ways, established practices and conventions within and between different modes of meaning. This includes the hybridisation of established modes of meaning (of discourses and genres), and multifarious combinations of modes of meaning cutting across boundaries of convention and creating new conventions"

The New London Group, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." p.30